March 2012 Archives

For the first Iteration of the class, it was more learning about my partner, his knowledge and limits as a programmer, as well as his style of programming and work ethic in general. The actual programming for Iteration 1 wasn't too bad, just a bunch of copying and pasting. Once we finally realized what the requirements were, we pretty much breezed through it. Which I guess is what programming in a real-world situation is like. After doing a lab or two, we were well acquainted with each other and the other's habits. So all that was left to do was split up the regular expressions and matching blocks of code and somehow store each token after it was matched. These were not too difficult to code, as there were examples given to us already.
For this iteration, we felt rushed because we waited until the last minute. I think for next time, it would benefit us to start right away, so that we can go to office hours and ask questions there or on Piazza. While splitting up the work this time wasn't too hard, this was due to mostly the fact that non of the code depended on something else, in that each regular expression did not depend on a previous one, so you could test one without the other. For this next iteration, I am not sure that this will be the same case. We will continue to do intermittent testing so that we do not finish the project, run it, and then have a page full of errors. This way, we can be sure that everything we have put together at this point is actually functioning the way we expect and want it to. For Iteration 2 however, we will need to have a better understanding of the requirements as those were a little vague to us. All in all, I think if we improve on these things, it shouldn't be too hard to implement the second iteration of our translator.